Reviews (2)

The course is basically impossible to fail as long as you attempt the work and pass the final. The finals are pretty much identical each semester. However, the flip side of this coupled with the ridiculous marking scheme (see below) means that achieving a 7 is practically impossible. In this course if you want a 7 you will have to go extremely well, and if you get below a 5 you deserved a 2.

The marks for everything are out of 7 (why???) and your mark is rounded to the nearest whole number. this means for calculating your final grade, there would be no overall difference between 5.5/7 and 6.4/7 (79% and 92%) which both round to a 6/7.

Your final grade is made by calculating the weighted average of each rounded mark (this is probably too complicated for you to follow if you are reading this for the first time... but it gets better).

All this means that to get a 7 for the course you need to get a weighted average after rounding of over 6.5/7 ( 93%). and effectively your marks for individual assesment can range by 30% without any difference being made.

FINAL GRADE = 6*20% + 6*10% + 6*40% + 6*40% + 5*30% = 5.7... which rounds up to a 6 for the course
(normal percent based grade = 71.75% which should be a 5)

What is worse is that a PAF is assigned to everyone's mark and student A and B could have been in the same group and gotten the same raw mark of 5.8/7 with the good student scaling up to 6.4/7 (as the scaling factor is capped at 1.1) while the bad student scaled down due to doing nowhere near enough work) and ended up with the same grade of a distinction in the course... when student A did all the work and got 100% on the final while studen B JUST passed the final and did nothing.

Semester taken

Semester 1 - 2015

Your program/major

Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology

Is lecture attendance necessary?

no, but it really helps if you\'d like to take anything from the course

Is the textbook necessary?

absolutely not

Positives

Really useful course - very intreesting

ASPEN and modelling and synthesis in general are very important to know

you will get at least a 5 unless you do literally nothing

Negatives

The poster - worth 10% and has no criteria

Stupid marking scheme - Grades are rounded to the nearest fraction out of 7

you will most likely have a really bad group and you will have the same bad members for 2 consecutive assignments

The course was mostly the same as CHEE2001 except the projects were different, more in-depth and used ASPEN. The exams are very similar year to year and required only a day or two revision. The project that my group chose was interesting and the post capture carbon project would have been more stimulating if there was still an incentive to capture the carbon (i.e. the carbon tax). So the content of the course was pretty interesting.

However, two parts of the course that were ridiculous were; one, the poster and two, the actual marking rubric of the course.

The Poster - 10% of the course and a third of the first project, we were given little time to produce the poster after completing the first project and no direction at all (unless the tutors specifically told you) and when receiving marks it was assumed that we were told exactly what to do and what should have been on the poster.

The Marking Rubric - The marking rubric for this course was extremely difficult to understand and unnecessary, how hard is it to use a percentage based mark? Rather than a percentage we were given a mark out of 7, i.e. 4.5 5.4 6.3, etc. These marks were 'easier to understand' but a 5.4 (77%?) rounds down to 65% a 5. The marking went 50% (3.5-4.4), 65% (4.5-5.4), 75% (5.5-6.4) and 100% >6.5.
So getting a 6.4, would get you 75% and 6.5 would get you 100%, great! No percentage grade marking made it almost impossible for a large portion of the grade to get a 7 or a decent mark. The course wasn't difficult but the marking rubric was.

xoxo thanks karen , I don't know what the mark for this course will be when I submit this but I'd barely put it over 50/100

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